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The course will focus on American abstract painting from the 1930s to the 1960s, emphasizing the works of art at the Anderson Collection at Stanford. We will focus on looking closely at pictures by Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and other renowned abstract painters, developing skills of speaking and writing about these works of art. We will also place these pictures in their mid-20th century context: World War II and the Cold War; Hollywood and popular culture generally; Beat literature; and locations such as New York and San Francisco.

This course focuses on the career of Andy Warhol as a means to consider the broader history of American art and culture since 1950. It examines little-studied aspects of Warhol¿s visual production (e.g. his career as a commercial artist in the 1950s and his everyday photographs of the 1970s and 1980s) alongside his now-canonical Pop paintings of the 1960s. Warhol?s critical and scholarly reception will be scrutinized in detail, as will published interviews of and writings by the artist. Finally, we will consider Warhol¿s legacy and wide-ranging influence on American culture in the decades since his death in 1987.

This course concentrates on many important American photographers, from the era of daguerreotypes to near the end of the pre-digital era. We study photographs of the Civil War, western exploration, artistic subjects, urban and rural poverty, skyscrapers, crime, fashion, national parks, and social protest, among other topics. Among the photographers we study: Carleton Watkins, Eadweard Muybridge, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Garry Winogrand, and Diane Arbus. Emphasis on developing students' abilities to discuss and write about photography; to see it.

Last offered: Spring 2014
| UG Reqs: GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II

ARTHIST 160N:The Sisters: Poetry & Painting (ENGLISH 51N)

Poetry and painting have often been called the "sister arts". Why? Sometimes a poem or a painting stands out to us, asking that we stay with it, that we remember it, although we cannot exactly say why. Poems have a way of making pictures in the mind, and paintings turn "rhymes" amid the people, places, and things they portray. Each is a concentrated world, inviting an exhilarating closeness of response: why does this line come first? Why does the artist include that detail? Who knows but that as we write and talk about these poems and pictures we will be doing what John Keats said a painter does: that is, arriving at a "trembling delicate and snail-horn perception of Beauty." Each week explore the kinship between a different pair of painter and poet and also focuses on a particular problem or method of interpretation. Some of the artist/poet combinations we will consider: Shakespeare and Caravaggio; Jorie Graham and (the photographer) Henri Cartier-Bresson; Alexander Pope and Thomas Gainsborough; William Wordsworth and Caspar David Friedrich; Christina Rossetti and Mary Cassatt; Walt Whitman and Thomas Eakins; Thomas Hardy and Edward Hopper.

Visual artists have long been in the forefront of social criticism in America. Since the 1960s, various visual strategies have helped emergent progressive political movements articulate and represent complex social issues. Which artists and particular art works/projects have become key anchors for discourses on racism, sexism, economic and social inequality, immigrant rights and climate change? We will learn about a spectrum of political art designed to raise social awareness, spark social change and rouse protest. The Art Workers Coalition's agit-prop opposing the Vietnam War and ACT-UP's emblematic signs and symbols during the AIDS/HIV crisis of the 1980s galvanized a generation into action. Works such as Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party (1979), Fred Wilson's Mining the Museum (1992), and Glenn Ligon's paintings appropriating fragments from African-American literature all raised awareness by excavating historical evidence of the long legacy resisting marginalization. For three decades
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Visual artists have long been in the forefront of social criticism in America. Since the 1960s, various visual strategies have helped emergent progressive political movements articulate and represent complex social issues. Which artists and particular art works/projects have become key anchors for discourses on racism, sexism, economic and social inequality, immigrant rights and climate change? We will learn about a spectrum of political art designed to raise social awareness, spark social change and rouse protest. The Art Workers Coalition's agit-prop opposing the Vietnam War and ACT-UP's emblematic signs and symbols during the AIDS/HIV crisis of the 1980s galvanized a generation into action. Works such as Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party (1979), Fred Wilson's Mining the Museum (1992), and Glenn Ligon's paintings appropriating fragments from African-American literature all raised awareness by excavating historical evidence of the long legacy resisting marginalization. For three decades feminist artists Adrian Piper, Barbara Kruger and the Guerilla Girls have combined institutional critique and direct address into a provocative form of criticality. Recent art for social justice is reaching ever broadening publics by redrawing the role of artist and audience exemplified by the democratization of poster making and internet campaigns of Occupy and the Movement for Black Lives. We will also consider the collective aesthetic activisms in the Post-Occupy era including Global Ultra Luxury Faction, Climate Justice art projects, and the visual culture of Trump era mass protests. Why are each of these examples successful as influential and enduring markers of social criticism? What have these socially responsive practices contributed to our understanding of American history?

An exploration of the dynamic relationship between technology and the ways we see and represent the world. The course examines technologies from the Renaissance through the present day, from telescopes and microscopes to digital detectors, that have changed and enhanced our visual capabilities as well as shaped how we imagine the world. We also consider how these technologies influenced and inspired the work of artists. Special attention is paid to how different technologies such as linear perspective, photography, cinema, and computer screens translate the visual experience into a representation; the automation of vision; and the intersection of technology with conceptions of time and space.

The complex and interdependent relationship between fashion and art. Topics include: the ways in which artists have used fashion in different art forms as a means to convey social status, identity, and other attributes of the wearer; the interplay between fashion designers and various art movements, especially in the 20th century; the place of prints, photography, and the Internet in fashion, in particular how different media shape how clothes are seen and perceived. Texts by Thorstein Veblen, Roland Barthes, Dick Hebdige, and other theorists of fashion.

Focus on the visual culture of fashion, especially in an American context. Topics include: the representation of fashion in different visual media (prints, photographs, films, window displays, and digital images); the relationship of fashion to its historical context and American culture; the interplay between fashion and other modes of discourse, in particular art, but also performance, music, economics; and the use of fashion as an expression of social status, identity, and other attributes of the wearer. Texts by Thorstein Veblen, Roland Barthes, Dick Hebdige, and other theorists of fashion.

(Same as
ARTHIST 176) The impact of second wave feminism on art making and art historical practice in the 70s, and its reiteration and transformation in contemporary feminist work. Topics: sexism and art history, feminist studio programs in the 70s, essentialism and self-representation, themes of domesticity, the body in feminist art making, bad girls, the exclusion of women of color and lesbians from the art historical mainstream, notions of performativity.

ARTHIST 178:Ethnicity and Dissent in United States Art and Literature (AMSTUD 178, ARTHIST 378)

The role of the visual arts of the U.S. in the construction and contesting of racial, class, and gender hierarchies. Focus is on artists and writers from the 18th century to 1990s. How power, domination, and resistance work historically. Topics include: minstrelsy and the invention of race; mass culture and postmodernity; hegemony and language; memory and desire; and the borderlands.